Southeast Asian languages

The Munda Subfamily

The languages of the Munda subfamily are spoken in parts of N and central India and comprise more than 20 tongues, the most important of which is Santali. The Munda languages use affixes extensively and are agglutinative. There are two genders for nouns in most of the Munda tongues, animate and inanimate. Most Munda languages also have three numbers—singular, dual, and plural. Suffixes and particles placed after the noun are used to express such features as number and possession, which are often indicated in Indo-European tongues by case inflection.